Drill Bird

A three-month project born from a studio closing

Drill Bird is the debut release of a small five-person team led by designer Sebastian Larsson, who built the core of the game in roughly three months after the studio he had previously worked at shut down, following four years at Thunderful that included a stint as game director on an unannounced SteamWorld project overseeing a team of around 25 developers. The finished game released 9 November 2025 for Windows, with Larsson handling design, code and art alongside Andrea Harty on art, Hampus Melin on sound design and music, Isabelle Neuman on cutscene animation and Luiza Flores da Cunha on the logo and voice acting. Players control a bird that has fallen from the sky, equipped with a drill for a beak, digging into a hand-designed underground map to gather precious ores, bringing them home to feed and empower a single egg, upgrading strength, health and carrying capacity along the way, all while racing to return home before night falls.

Charm reviewers can't stop describing

The single most consistent thread across Drill Bird's review corpus is enthusiasm for its charm. Reviewers repeatedly and specifically describe the bird protagonist, its pixel-art cutscenes and its overall tone as adorable without tipping into saccharine territory, and sound design draws some of the most unreserved superlative praise in the entire corpus, with multiple reviewers independently singling out the creature and bird noises as among the cutest and most soothing sound design they've encountered in a game this size. The core gameplay loop — dig for ore, return home before night, upgrade, repeat — draws specific, repeated credit for tight pacing, with reviewers comparing it favourably to SteamWorld Dig and Dome Keeper while consistently noting that Drill Bird trades those games' larger scale and procedural generation for a smaller, hand-designed map that several reviewers argue produces a more carefully tuned difficulty curve as a direct result. The game's largely wordless story, building toward what multiple reviewers describe as a genuine surprise ending, draws consistent credit for landing real emotional weight despite minimal dialogue and a brief runtime.

An honest debate about length, held by fans themselves

Set against that praise, the single most consistent complaint in Drill Bird's review base isn't really a complaint from critics so much as an honest tension within its own fans. Most reviewers report completing the game in roughly one to two hours, and a meaningful number explicitly weigh that runtime against the asking price even within reviews that ultimately recommend the game, with one detailed review specifically suggesting half the current price would feel more proportionate to the content on offer. That tension reads differently depending on a given reviewer's frame of reference: players comparing Drill Bird to full-length genre entries like SteamWorld Dig 2 are more likely to describe it as a demo-sized taste of a bigger idea, while players treating its low price as the point tend to frame the short runtime as a deliberate, disciplined choice rather than a shortfall, with more than one reviewer explicitly praising the developers for stopping "while ahead" rather than padding the experience with unnecessary grind.

A control scheme built gamepad-first

A separate, more technical complaint concerns PC control setup specifically. At least one detailed critical review describes the game's tutorial as showing generic gamepad button prompts rather than keyboard-and-mouse equivalents, forcing keyboard players to guess which key corresponds to each instruction, a problem the developers reportedly patched shortly after being reported. The same review notes a more persistent gap: the game offers no keybind remapping options at all, which the reviewer specifically frames as more than a minor annoyance, arguing it represents a real accessibility concern for players who can't comfortably use the default control scheme. That criticism sits alongside a smaller thread of reports describing occasional menu-related bugs and one instance of an enemy freezing in place, issues reviewers consistently treat as minor blemishes rather than serious problems on an otherwise well-functioning release.

Built to be finished, not to be endless

Several reviewers frame Drill Bird's brevity as its defining creative choice rather than a limitation, and the review corpus backs that framing with specific, granular detail: a 53% completion rate cited by one detailed review is unusually high for a game its size, suggesting most buyers who start Drill Bird actually finish it, a genuine rarity in a marketplace full of longer games left permanently unfinished in players' libraries. Achievement-driven replayability adds modest extra value for completionist-minded players, with specific optional goals like finishing in under twenty minutes or completing a run without a single enemy dying drawing credit as clever, low-pressure ways to extend a second or third playthrough without demanding the kind of grind the base game deliberately avoids.

Value

At NZ$7.89, Drill Bird sits at a genuinely low price point, and the specific value debate running through its own review base — whether an hour or two of content justifies even that modest cost — is worth taking at face value rather than dismissing, since it comes largely from reviewers who otherwise recommend the game without reservation. The Very Positive score — 391 positive against just 8 negative across 399 reviews — reflects a review base charmed by Drill Bird's presentation and tightly designed loop, tempered by an honest, specific minority who feel its runtime doesn't quite match its price point. For fans of SteamWorld Dig and Dome Keeper looking for a compact, beautifully realised afternoon rather than a lasting commitment, Drill Bird is an easy, low-risk recommendation. </content>